In June 2009 An Event entitled “20 Jahre Freiheit: Deutschland sagt Danke!” took place in Slovakia’s capital, Bratislava. It was organized by the German Foreign Office and the German Embassy in cooperation with the Slovak Foreign and Cultural Ministries and other partners. This was one of a number of commemorative occasions in different parts of eastern Europe: others took place in Prague, Warsaw, Gdansk, and Budapest. Designed to foster dialogue between German perspectives on the recent past and those of the post-communist states, these events sought to celebrate common achievements since the fall of the Iron Curtain while expressing Germany’s gratitude to its eastern neighbors. As part of a multifacetted cultural program Monika Maron was invited to read from Stille Zeile sechs, advertised by the organizers as her “new book.” In reality, of course, Maron’s text was published eighteen years earlier, in 1991. After the reading she gave a brief interview to one of Slovakia’s high-profile young TV journalists. Asked the question “Wie fühlen Sie sich als Mensch, zwanzig Jahre nach dem Fall der Mauer?” the author was noticeably challenged to provide an answer to such an embarrassing question on live television. Her reaction suggests that she was acutely aware of the fact that anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall have become stage-managed media events. The way in which these commemorative occasions are organized also highlights a number of factors of wider relevance to our present discussion: how powerful a role the present plays in shaping the dominant images of the past; how much our understanding of the past is shaped by a specific constellation of contemporary circumstances; and how significant the differences between generations are in determining the way they each engage with the past.

Reassessing Europe’s history of division and the specific history of a state that has now disappeared is a matter of social concern not only in Germany but in Slovakia as well, and the issue has featured prominently in public discourse there. The socialist Czechoslovak state has actually disappeared twice: first in 1989 with the fall of the Iron Curtain, and then again in 1993 with the division of Czechoslovakia. As a result many Czechs understood only too well what it meant when East German citizens, or East German writers for that matter, expressed a sense of having become strangers or exiles in their homeland without having physically left it.